In a recent issue of “What’s New in Town” appeared an article by a certain Mr.
Marquand, of New York, entitled “My Boston.”

It was a bit of the type of propaganda New
Yorkers, and other outsiders, are only too apt to turn on Boston―the basic idea
being that anything from hereabouts must be ridiculed or belittled, regardless
of other circumstances.

“His Boston” Mr. Marquand illustrates by
the old satiric verses about the Cabots and the Lowells, and about “Berekely
Copley’s son.” It may be that these things are appropriate to the self-styled
aristocracy in the Back Bay and points west; but, whether that is true or not,
Mr. Marquand himself admits that that is only a small percentage of Boston,
which he refers to as a “hinterland.” Mr. Marquand appears to have no knowledge
at all, yet he presumes to write books and articles on Boston, from the point of
view of the insular Manhattanite determined to see no good in this part of the
world. Of our Boston, of the vast metropolis that exceeds anything of its
kind on earth, with its cosmopolitan population of well over two million people,
Mr. Marquand knows nothing,―yet he poses as an authority, much on the order of
many European visitors to America who visit New York for a week or two then
lecture us on the faults of our country. The fact is, that what is “hinterland”
to him is to us the Great Metropolis, and “his Boston” is just a tiny community
which really forms no part of the city’s life.

Mr. Marquand’s idea of Boston, besides
Back Bay and Beacon Hill, includes some of the standard tourist sights, of the
kind that unfortunately give the visitor the false impression of a quaint old
village that does not know of the modern world at all. As for the age of
colonial settlement, New York is definitely older than Boston; while it is
hardly fair to treat as a quaint historical relic the city that produced the
telephone, the apartment house, the sewing machine, the subway, the safety
razor, the colored motion picture, and numerous other modern inventions which
little insular Manhattan was slow to adopt but quick to claim as her own after
the adoption.